Comment by syedkarim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by syedkarim | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I haven't had any luck with this approach. In some cases, the good-lawyer-you-know will respect the intellect of a lawyer from another firm that has a specialty in IP law. And then the referral will get passed down to an associate partner who is just overseeing the work of junior lawyers. In that scenario, the referral from the good-lawyer-you-know had no real value.

The other scenario is that the good-lawyer-you-know has a personal relationship with a practicing (as opposed to managing) IP lawyer. This may be a solo practitioner. But the problem with this approach is the the good-lawyer-you-know is relying on an instinctual assessment of the IP lawyer (I like this person; they seem smart), since the good-lawyer you know has not had a need to defend or litigate IP matters.

My experience comes from working with a dozen different lawyers, with many being rereferred. I have had $1200/hour partners provide me with factually incorrect information (wrong about actual black-and-white law). And I have had lawyers provide me with $20,000 legal briefs I did not authorize or order.

When it comes to litigation attorneys, I have had some success finding a lawyer through other founders who had been fighting lawsuits for years and hired/fired several lawyers to finally settle on the most competent. I have also had luck in finding legal specialists by becoming very well informed on the subject matter (reading lots of case law) and then interviewing random lawyers, who I usually came across through legal blog posts.

Lawyers, like any other profession, are 95% incompetent.

Finding the 5% that are competent is harder than it looks.

And the hourly rate and/or physical location of said lawyer bares no correlation to competence level.

And once you find that person they usually get scooped up and become GC for some VC funded startup or whatever because word travels.

Agree. The same applies by the way, to International Tax Advisers and specially if you are doing business across several countries in EU.

I paid 200 to 300 dollars per hour for International Tax Consultants, that were unable to understand the most common cross country tax scenarios, like "triangular taxation". At the same time, very cheap and experienced "regular accountants" provided, clear, concise and correct advice.

Yeah, funnily enough my experience is based on international tax advice.

No one actually knows anything about this, save for like 3 people world wide for each country pair.

Lawyers will happily bill you for incorrect advice because their liability is limited to the amount invoiced. But you can end up with massive tax bills based on that bad advice.

You can do better by reading the law and tax treaties yourself, then getting someone to verify your interpretation.

Law is just code for humans.

Also yes to good accountants.

A lot of things you can pay a lawyer for business/tax/etc wise, your accountant can probably do better and cheaper.

Accountants are under-appreciated. lol.

In my experience physicians are not 95% incompetent. Is there something inherently different about law from medicine? Or is more like how 95% of physicians couldn’t help you with a specific problem because it’s outside their specialty?

As someone who went through a tonne of so-called medical experts for a chronic condition I can say that, based on my experience, most people involved in medicine are incompetent. lol.

You just have to bounce around until you hit someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

@foobarbazetc I and some others I know, share your experiences. This is in north western Europe btw.

Are you saying that carpenters, electricians, pumblers, builders, cobblers, taxi drivers, nurses, and public school teachers are 95% incompetant? If so, please kindly provide anecdata. This is a positively ridiculous acusation.

My partner is a nurse by trade and has observed negligent behavior by medical professions every single time we've been to a hospital. Most of the time it is minor, but there have been times where she's had to speak up and get supervisors involved.

I'd say that "95% of people exhibit incompetence at least once per shift" is not far from the truth. I've been in taxis where the driver has run redlights. I built a house so I know all about keeping tradesman honest.

It's worse with lawyers, in that mistakes they make can go unnoticed for years or forever, so bad lawyers can still bring in lots of money to the company that provides them to you. Or so I think.

And the same with doctors, unfortunately, when they don't meet the person they treated again, when there's no follow up if it worked or not.

Plumbers, though, are different, in that then there's more feedback: does the water pipe still leak, or not? So they need to do something that actually works.

I think if we relax the statement a bit, to something like

"95% of all workers perform at the bare minimum required not to get fired or sued."

- it becomes quite defensible. To someone used to high performance, that does look like incompetence.

Also, it is much harder to fake it in typical trades than in "professions".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com